


Conduit

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [4]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-03
Packaged: 2018-04-02 17:25:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4068361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Have you ever asked a question that wasn't impertinent, Mulder?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conduit

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 1.03 "Conduit"  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

A tabloid headline, and they were off to Iowa. Scully read the flimsy paper from cover to cover on the flight down as Mulder ate in-flight peanuts and lectured on the typical symptoms of alien abduction and the tumultuous history of the lake. She left the tabloid tucked into the seat pocket next to the barf bag, a little delight for the next weary passenger. Mulder talked all the way down the stairs and across the tarmac. He was still listing instances of sightings and rumors of abductions as they waited for their bags at the single clanking conveyor belt. 

"Ask a ten cent impertinent question," she said wryly as he lifted their suitcases into the trunk of the rental car, "get a dollar's worth of impertinent answer."

"It may be an impertinent question, Scully," he said, "but I assure you, asking is essential if we want to give a voice to the victims of these phenomena."

She glanced at him and back at the map of Sioux City they'd gotten with the rental car. "Have you ever asked a question that wasn't impertinent, Mulder?" 

He laughed. "Not if I can help it."

She smiled to herself.

\+ + + + 

There was no trout fishing in Lake Okobogee. 

There were perch. There were walleye. There were pike. But those were the particulars, and Scully already knew that Mulder was not overly concerned with particulars. He was a child of the coast, but he didn't know water the way she did. To Mulder, a fish was a fish, unless it was an ichthyosaur. He looked to the sky and found signs and wonders. She looked at the ground and saw a sad, desperate town full of people who ducked when a cloud scudded across the moon and whispered secrets between the library books.

Scully had known there would be a child, but she was caught off-balance all the same by the seriousness of him. Kevin ducked his ash-blond head and kept scribbling numbers, guided by some divine inspiration sifting through the static of the television. It was easy to feel the ache in the house. Darlene had lost her youth, her little girl, and the young woman her little girl had become. She held onto her son with what was left of her strength, and Kevin, too small to bear their double weight, anchored himself in the numbers, gazing faithfully into the snowy screen. 

Mulder's grief sloshed in him like the heavy green water of the lake. He spoke to her of it in the dark, as if in daylight, it would be too much to bear. In the dark, in the car, he could gaze at the road and avoid her eyes. In the dark, in the car, they were back in the hotel room in Oregon, building some hidden structure of support, shoring each other up against loss and harm. She understood his need to tear the grave apart, to tear the woods apart if that's what it took. She understood his need to shelter Kevin from a lifetime of walking into rooms with his eyes screwed closed and hope and despair pinpricking behind his lids. He played bad cop and good cop and victim and savior and she was along for the ride, trying to orient herself by the charred tree tops.

When his intuition earthed itself, she thought, there would be fulgurites struck deep into the sand, three thousand degrees of shimmering electric thought crystallizing the everyday into something pure and strange.

\+ + + + 

In a child's scribbled binary, a fragment of Bach. 

In the Iowa woods, white wolves behaving oddly.

In the heart of America, men in dire black suits with mirrored eyes.

Char on the roof of an RV. Lights in the sky. A weightless girl brought back to earth in a thunder of growling engines and a smudge of exhaust.

Tessa wore red lipstick as a flag of defiance, but she could not escape the morass of her life or the consequences of her actions. A trapped animal will lash out. Her eyes in the interrogation room were the eyes of the rabbit caged while the fox paced outside. 

\+ + + + 

"There is no resolution to this case," Scully wrote in her report, and then deleted it, and wrote instead, "No conclusion can be drawn about the extended disappearance of Ruby Morris, who declined to provide any information about her absence or her return."

She saved the document. She would email it in the morning. 

On the desk by her hand lay a plastic bag full of neatly labeled tapes. She had found them in the filing cabinet along with the manila folder bearing his sister's name. She slipped the first one out of its case and turned it over in her fingers. It felt heavy. The tape rattled loosely inside the confines of the plastic. She wound it taut with her pinky, the wheel biting into the pad of her finger, and then she slotted the cassette into the player. There was a brief moment of staticky silence. She flipped the folder gently open, smoothing the pages with one hand.

"Doctor Heitz Werber, deep regression hypnosis therapy, Fox Mulder, June second," said a voice with a German accent. "Are you ready, Fox?"

"I'm ready," said Mulder.

Scully closed her eyes and felt the gloss of photograph paper under her fingertips.


End file.
